A novel utility based metric and routing for energy efficiency in software defined networking

Abstract

Software defined networking (SDN) is a rapidly growing networking paradigm in both industry and research areas, with network programmability as its powerful feature which enables propagating changes in the network easily. However, the links and switches are designed to accommodate maximum traffic load and their power consumption is not traffic aware. The logically centralized control in SDN enables dynamically minimizing the energy consumption of the links and the switches by diverting paths of packets. Energy efficiency and performance are opposite objectives that have to be addressed simultaneously. As the main contributions in this study, we first propose an energy efficiency metric Energy Profit Threshold (EPT) that is applicable to SDN. Then, we provide Integer Programming (IP) formulation with the objective of maximizing the EPT of a software defined network environment. Experimental results show that maximizing the EPT value exhibits energy saving of more than 35 % as compared to other utility based energy saving algorithms.